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03 October 2009

A week in the bag

I ran, ran, ran for all of last week, and it felt really good to be doing stuff again. Monday was my first class, Tuesday was student orientation, Wednesday was work on the garden and supervision meeting, Thursday was the launch of the empathy project that my supervisor is working on, and Friday was the first meeting of the empathy group.

At 12:01 on Thursday morning, my registration magically changed from Master of Research Methods to PhD without so much as a peep. Now, I am a full-fledged PhD student, with no asterisk next to my name. I'm not sure this affords me anything new, but I am pretty happy about it. I was pretty stoked this week to be in the groups that I was, especially at the empathy launch. How I found myself in this group of people, eating excellent free food, and talking with top professors in this field is beyond me, but I do feel quite lucky. Lucky is the wrong word. Blessed is also the wrong word. I feel like I've gotten what it is I wanted and although I know how it happened, I don't really know how it happened.

This coming week I will be in London on Monday and Friday for work, and I have my viva for my MRes dissertation on Tuesday. I expect to spend all of Wednesday and Thursday making corrections, and hopefully be done this week. Then, I can go back to the job that I love best: reading. I will be paid to read for three months, at least, with no other expectations on me, except my part-time work... and the journal article editing... and my students at Birmingham... My supervisors will let me be free for a couple of months, at least.